I am a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University-University Park. My research interests include information retrieval, data mining and machine learning and their applications to search engines. I did an internship at Ask.com in 2005, focusing on information extraction from web sites. In 2006, I went to Google as an intern, and worked on projects related to personalized search. At Penn State, I worked on the design and development of CiteSeerX and currently working on ChemXSeer, two niche search engines and digital libraries in the fields of Computer Science and Chemistry, respectively. I had also taken on the responsibilities of development, maintenance and co-administration of CiteSeer and SmealSearch with my colleagues under the supervision of Prof. C. Lee Giles.
I was born in London/England and raised there, in Hamburg/Germany and Ankara/Turkey. I got my mid- and high-school diplomas from Ari Koleji in Ankara where I spent seven years after primary school. I received the B.Sc degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi, Ankara, Turkey. Upon graduation, I joined CyberSoft as the group leader of Tax Offices Complete Automation Project (VEDOP), which is known to be the largest IT project in Turkey by that time. Following the completion of the project, I came to U.S. to pursue a graduate degree in Computer Science. I got my M.Sc degree in Computer Science from Center for Advanced Computer Studies at UL Lafayette.
After I joined Penn State, I also did some work on multimodal human computer interaction with applications to Geographic Information Science (GIS). I developed software architectures, namely Dave_G and GCCM, that enable geographically distributed users to collaborate through GIS using natural speech and gestures in front of large screen displays, using laptops and hand-held devices. In 2004, I served as a software consultant for Video Mining, Inc. (formerly known as Advanced Interfaces, Inc.) for the development of GeoMIP, a Multimodal Interface Platform for Geographical Information Systems.
My interests outside of computing include skiing, racquet sports, photography and caffeinated beverages.